Hasta La Ideas

This vase by Charlie Guda for Rotterdam company The Cottage Industry combines a test-tube with a magnifying lens to show off tiny single blooms.

The Big Bloom vase uses an acrylic fresnel lens with two legs to add stability.

See more vases on Dezeen »

Here’s some text from The Cottage Industry:

We have Augustin-Jean Fresnel to thank for the creation of a thinner and lighter lens which we today aptly call the Fresnel lens.

The idea dates back to the seventeenth century and was then employed to reduce the bulk of glass that was then necessary for the manufacture of the lenses in a lighthouse.

Since then it has been used widely in car headlights, overhead projectors (for those old enough to remember!), reading aids and hand held magnifying glasses.

In hommage to Monsieur Fresnel, we would hereby like to reinstate his invention for something a little less prosaic namely, to magnify and enhance the flower!

The all new transparent Big Bloom vase will greatly magnify any flower allowing you to see the fine intricacies of the flower in much greater detail.

Whether it’s a rose you received from your loved one or a flower plucked from your garden…this vase knows how to make the best of it.

Hackney designer Philippe Malouin worked with traditional craftsmen from Beirut to create a series of bowls and plinths by shaping wooden blocks made of many smaller, tessellating batons.

Commissioned by Carwan Gallery, his Extrusion project combines the techniques used to make decorative wooden inlays with those of a lathe-worker.

The constructed block would normally be sliced into thin layers and used to decorate boxes but Malouin freezes the traditional process at this point and hands it over to be turned on a lathe.

The Extrusion collection was shown at Design Days Dubai in March, Milan in April and will travel back to Carwan Gallery in Beirut this summer.

Born in Canada and graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2008, Malouin now has a studio in Homerton and you can read all our stories about his work here.

Here are some more details from Malouin:

Carwan Gallery was kind enough to invite me to visit Beirut last year. During my visit, I was taken around the city to visit the many inspiring landmarks, including the Oscar Niemeyer international fair (below). Construction stopped in 1975 at the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war and was never restarted. We also visited local craftsmen and manufacturers in order that we might produce the gallery’s next collection in Beirut.

One specific craft interested me, which was intarsia making. Intarsia makers produce amazing wood-inlayed and patterned boxes. These inlays are used only for decorative purposes on the outside of the boxes. I was especially interested in the way in which a thin patterned sliver comes to life from a bigger ‘wooden sushi roll,’ which will be sliced into wafer-thin pieces in order to be inlayed on the exteriors of the wood boxes.

The geometric patterns were very beautiful, but it’s the ‘wood-sushi’ block itself that inspired me the most. I was also interested in using more than one craft, or more than one craftsman in order to realize the final piece. I was introduced to a local lathe-worker and the idea came together: I wanted the intarsia worker to create intricately patterned wood logs to then give to the lathe-worker, who would transform them into objects.

Key:

Blue = designers
Red = architects
Yellow = brands

See a larger version of this map

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created in the borough, which is one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices. We’ll publish buildings, interiors and objects that have been designed in Hackney each day until the games this summer.

More information and details of how to get involved can be found at www.designedinhackney.com.

This blanket is embroidered with tiny sensors so it can watch you sleeping.

Called Im Blanky, it maps the positions of 104 tilt sensors arranged in hexagons across its surface, which communicate changes in resistance to a controller that’s stitched to the back of the blanket, which in turn sends the data wirelessly to a computer that digitally recreates the shape of the whole surface (see movie above).

It was developed in the RAD laboratory at the University of Toronto by Studio NMinusOne and Rodolphe el-Khoury, who say that possible applications could include monitoring those with sleep disorders or watching the vital signs of elderly patients who aren’t being cared for in hospitals.

As part of a future where more and more devices are wirelessly connected, it could automatically turn down your central heating or open a window to maintain comfortable sleeping conditions.

Embroidered in swirling floral patterns on green taffeta, the blanket was commissioned by WORKShop Toronto for an exhibition called Stitches that asked participants to marry traditional embroidery and stitching with new technologies.

Read more about how information technology is creeping into everyday objects, turning them into devices and apps that monitor our behaviour and communicate with each other, in our special report for Intel here.

Here’s some more information from Studio NMinusOne and Rodolphe el-Khoury:

IM BLANKY is a blanket with an IP address. The basic v. 1.0 is self-modeling, which means that it is wirelessly linked to a digital model that registers and represents its changing state in real time. The built-in capacity to situate and represent itself in space and time points to a most primitive and essential form of cognition, the sense of one’s own body. This ability constitutes a foundation for multiple additional functionalities that would be enabled with the use of other sensing devices in future generations of IM BLANKY.

Soft tilt sensors arrayed in a hexagrid pattern and sewn into the fabric of the blanket enable the digital self-modeling. The data they generate—variation in current resistance—establishes the vectors from which the shape of the entire blanket is computationally extrapolated.

The electronic components and their circuits constitute figurative patterns. The organization of flows and connections here reproduces the logic of nature in generating intricate and hierarchical forms: stems, flowers and petals are the decorative by-product as much as the motivated form of a functional circuit.

IM BLANKY was commissioned by WORKShop Toronto for “Stitches,” an exhibition that invited artists and designers to project traditional embroidery and stitching practices into the 21st century. IM BLANKY aligns ornamental craft with digital electronics and computation to invest the intelligence and knowledge built into traditional materials and forms with a renewed purpose and relevance in increasingly networked environments.

(soft) Hardware:

The blanket measures 7’7” x 4’2” and comprises 104 tilt sensors. They are arrayed in a hexa-grid formation and distributed uniformly over its entire field. The flower-like sensors consist of 6 conductive petal-like pads, radiating from a conductive tassel attached to a powered double-arabesque of conductive wire. The resistance in the current flowing through petal and tassel varies depending on which petal is in contact with the tassel (The R value thus indexes the direction of the tassel). The flowers are arranged in 16 clusters and their stems connected to computational node (Multiplexer). The nodes communicate the fluctuation in current resistance recorded at each flower to a microcontroller stitched to the back of the blanket (Arduino Lillypad). The data is communicated wirelessly to a computer (XBee Shield)

Software:

Each flower occupies a hexagonal cell, surrounded by six neighbors. The computation script extrapolates directional vectors from current resistance data and models a slope based on the orientation of that of that cell in relation to that of its immediate 6 neighbors. The algorithm generates a field of peaks and valleys that is fine-tuned into a smooth polygonal mesh by negotiating local conditions at each cluster within the behavior parameters of the overall figure (Processing).

The research for this project was conducted at RAD, a laboratory of embedded and situated technology at the Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto

Credits:

Studio NMinusOne in collaboration with Rodolphe el-Khoury
Principals in Charge at Studio NMinusOne: Christos Marcopoulos and Carol Moukheiber
Fabrication Team: Valentina Mele, Sebastian Savone, Yie Ping See
Programming: Jonah Ross Marrs, Samar Sabie, Dina Sabie

These plates by Polish designer Boguslaw Sliwinski turn your meals into hairstyles for the faces they depict. 

Called FaceOn, each ceramic plate bears one of six silhouettes.

They’re produced to order in two sizes and can be ordered via the designer’s website.

A while ago we published a similar project from Sliwiński where morsels of food complete drawings of cranes, forklift trucks, ships, trucks and trains.

Take a look at them here.

See more tableware on Dezeen here.

UK designer Michael Antrobus has created a corkscrew and bottle opener by making just a few twists in flat stainless steel bars.

On sale at the MAK Design Shop in Vienna, each product is held in place with just a single weld.

Ground Barware is an extension of the stationery set he created while studying at Kingston University in 2009 (see our earlier story) which aimed to find domestic applications for products of the British steel industry.

Photographs are by Verena Melgarejo.

Here are some more details from Antrobus:

Ground objects are the outcome of a hands on material lead design process, characterised by experimentation and reduction. The result of working exclusively with flat steel using simple jigs and press tools. The bottle opener and corkscrew are the first objects from a wider continuation of the Ground series which began with a collection of stationery.

Each object is formed from a single length of 4000 Series Stainless Steel. First, a common tool is used to twist sections of each rectangular blank 180 degrees. A single twist forms a handle for the corkscrew and two opposing twists at the apex of the handle add the functional characteristic of the bottle opener. After twisting the blanks are taken to a fly press where radial bends are added. Once compete and correctly aligned the form of each object is secured with the application of a single precise weld, the weld is ground flush, before the objects are brushed to a matt finish.

Corkscrew: 110mm x 110mm
Bottle opener:195mm x 50mm